As Neowin reports, fans looking for the most-powerful variant of the Surface Book have had to wait since its October 6 announcement to place pre-orders. Today, Microsoft added the listing to its own Store website and in doing so has confirmed the price will be as extortionate as you can get for a laptop.
At $3,199, the top-spec Surface Book costs another $500 more than the model directly beneath it with the only hardware change being the addition of an extra 512GB of storage. With an Intel Skylake Core i7 processor, dedicated NVIDIA GPU for gaming and video editing, 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage there’s no doubt that the range-topper will power its way through any task with ease, but Microsoft is unlikely to sell many laptops at this price regardless of performance.
The Surface Book was announced at Microsoft’s October 6 Windows 10 devices event in New York City. It is being marketed as the “ultimate laptop” and is supposed to be at least twice as fast as Apple’s MacBook Pro.
It features a 13.5-inch 3000×2000 resolution touchscreen display with Microsoft PixelSense technology to reduce latency and parallax for more sensitive inputs. Although designed primarily as a convertible laptop, the display can be detached from the keyboard to create a standalone tablet with a battery life of three to four hours.
This is achieved through a unique design that sees the essential components stored under the display and the extra powerhouse kept beneath the keyboard tray. This allows the device to keep operating with the keyboard detached but it ends up leaving the graphics card behind.
The Surface Book includes a Surface Pen, which can be used for precise writing and drawing in several different applications. The laptop has two USB 3.0 ports, an 8MP rear-camera and 5MP front-camera and front-firing Dolby stereo speakers.
Microsoft says it is “ounce for ounce the fastest 13-inch laptop ever made” due to its Intel Skylake processors and optional NVIDIA graphics card. It is aimed squarely at professionals who are looking for unparalleled performance from a mobile device in a notebook form factor.
Currently, anybody looking to buy one will have to find at least $1,499 in their pockets and sit through a seven- to eight-week waiting time for delivery. With even the priciest top-spec models selling quickly, Microsoft appears to have created another hit with the Surface Book. The company has said that demand has exceeded its first expectations although this is always hard to gauge when launching an entirely new type of product.
